Is it safe to link oneTBB statically if I only use concurrent containers?

[Wizmann]

Hi oneTBB team,

I know that static linking of oneTBB is generally discouraged because of duplicated schedulers and global state issues.

In my case, I only use concurrent data structures such as:

• concurrent_queue
• concurrent_vector
• concurrent_hash_map
• ...

I don’t use any task scheduling APIs (parallel_for, task_arena, etc.).

So I’d like to ask:

1. Is it safe to build and link oneTBB as a static library in this limited use case?
2. Do these concurrent containers internally depend on the global scheduler or other runtime components that make static linking unsafe?

Thanks a lot!

[dnmokhov]

Hi @Wizmann,

Thank you for the questions!

1. If you only use concurrent containers, it is safe to build and link oneTBB as a static library. In fact, you don't need to build and link it at all. The container implementation is header-only and, as mentioned in https://uxlfoundation.github.io/oneTBB/main/tbb_userguide/Containers.html, "these containers can be used with raw Windows* OS or Linux* OS threads".
2. The concurrent containers do not depend on the global scheduler or other runtime components that make static linking unsafe.